Resources To Build Electric Guitars

For me, guitar-building is fundamentally a creative endeavour. Even though it requires a lot of technical skills in woodworking, fundamentally, the underlying inspiration and motivation for designing and building guitars is based in satisfying my creativity needs.

There’s already plenty of “how-to” resources on the Internet for building guitars, including this website, but there’s not as many for the artistic or inspirational element of this craft.

In this article, I want to list some of my favourite resources including documentaries, movies, shows and books that I consider “must-consume” content if you are the creative type and get a boost from watching other people create amazing things, not just guitars.

These resources are not educational or “how-to” but rather inspirational and often deal with the reasons of “why” we do something.

So here we go, in no particular order, I hope you find them as enjoyable, inspirational and motivational as I do.

Restrung

This is a well-made 55 mins documentary that documents the guitar-building life of Randall Fullmer of Wyn Guitars. It’s freely available on Youtube.

There’s also a playlist of 16 videos where Randall goes through the whole process of the steps involved in building his basses.

Jiro Dreams Of Sushi

This 1 h 23 mins documentary highlights the life of Jiro, considered to be world’s best sushi maker. There are so many parallels with guitar building, including his quest for perfection, obsession for quality and depleting resources of top-quality materials.

It’s difficult to believe the level of quality and craftsmanship he demands of himself and his workers and the never-ending evolution of the craft.

You can find Jiro Dreams Of Sushi on Netflix(unfortunately it’s not currently available in Canada)

Here’s a 2 mins Youtube preview

Indie Game: The Movie

This documentary shows the emotional roller coaster ride of three separate computer game programmers.

The journey of a large project, the hard work, frustration and eventual sense of accomplishment of a completed project are so familiar to guitar builders.

The full movie *was* available on Netflix https://www.netflix.com/title/70229918